False Entry (40 page)

“She won’t come back, then?” Pierre nodded toward the tote-bag.

“They’ll want to stay out of it. One can’t blame them. Even if she would—the rest won’t let her. They’ll fold their tents—now that they’ve heard.”

“But you’ll be out of it too, then. If you have to stay here.”

“Yes,” said his uncle. “I s’ll have to beg off. I s’ll be out of it. Yes.”

Pierre drank his tea in silence. The silence of the young, cold with its own fear of compromise, is a bitter courtesy.

“I do not
choose
to,” said his uncle.

You chose not to beg off in the beginning.

“Last night, when I said what I did—that I would not be used—I said it in anger. …”

Last night, when my mother cried out again and said, “Now send me to hospital!” you refused her. “No,” you said, “you’ll stay here. And I with you.” I saw her grateful look when you said that. You chose.

“One way or t’other,” said his uncle, “a man must expect to be used.”

You chose to break your oath. You will be.

“But one doesn’t always choose for oneself, d’ya see … you see that?”

I see that you can speak, in your way.

“For that matter … rather by Dobbin … than by that crowd—”

And I listen—in mine.

“That man, Dabney Mount—the one who’s always hanging about the courthouse—that scrap—you remember?”

I remember. All the characters are coming out of lodging.

“Stopped me yesterday, as I was leaving. Asked after your mother … that dirt. Hinted he’d like to sponsor me at the cockfight, down at Semple’s. They keep a cock there, you know, match it once in a while, just for show.”

I know. Shall I ever tell you—what I know?

“The Lord is my witness I’ve never been friend to them.”

No one is my witness. And the listener is never the friend.

“What’s Dobbin after?” said Pierre.

At these words, his uncle leaned back in his chair, his eyelids rising and falling—and Pierre saw that he had been speaking in that communicative trance which comes with exhaustion; not counting other interrupted nights and days, he had been up since six the previous morning. “Jury trial.” He spoke thickly. “Get them to a jury trial, no matter the verdict. Get the names down on legal record, sooner or later they’re done for.” He rested his head back. “Done.” He closed his eyes, his lips still moving. “Write that kind of cock with two
k’s
, don’t you,’ I said, ‘Mount?’”

“What’s in it for Dobbin? Why would he?” The district attorney’s name was faintly familiar, surely local.

“Judgeship. Say he wants … federal ju’ship.” His head moved from side to side. “Do a job, maybe—know whose blood
he
is.” His jaw fell, closed again. “Forty winks. You spell me.” His chin sank to his breast; the stubbled cheeks moving tranquilly out and in. It had barely rested so, when the whole head snapped back, eyes wide. “Somebody outside. At the door.”

Pierre went to answer it; had his hand on the knob.

“Stand back!” His uncle’s whisper warmed his ear; he had been crept up upon from behind. Silently he was motioned aside, his uncle’s hand, arm outstretched, replacing his on the knob, turning it fraction by fraction. Suddenly he whipped the door back against him.

Nothing entered except a little dark, of the same temperature as the room, yet different, the infinitesimal gap between outdoors and in, appreciable in the roots of the hair, by the skin on the backs of the hands. His uncle peered around the door, Pierre after him. Nothing was there. As they stood there, they heard the gathering chip-chip of the birds.

“Dreaming myself in Ireland—must have—” said his uncle. He had been a Tommy there from 1916 until the truce, was ashamed of his part in the war, ordinarily never spoke of it. “That’s what they used to tell us.” He spoke close to Pierre’s shoulder, eyes on the distance, as an elder huntsman might speak in low-voiced counsel. “Never stand in a lighted door.”

Pierre nodded, as if he too could see Ireland. Eastward, the great embankments rode like true cloud, their immense counterside as hidden. At such an hour, or darker, a town enfeoffed here might still dream it kept its own horizon.

“Uncle—” He spoke without thinking, as men say—or from the seat in the depths of thought, ever reserved. “Get me to Dobbin. I know the names.”

In the moment he spoke he knew his stumble as an actor does, foresaw the look on his uncle’s face before it turned.

“You—
?
You
know?”

The role of the listener is never fully learned.

His uncle swept an arm outward. Against that wide sweep, his whisper seemed small. “D’ya think there’s anyone—including Dobbin—who doesn’t?”

Still whispering, he pushed Pierre inside. “Including—the jury?”

The door closed safely behind them. “Including—Bean?”

As if in answer, they heard a shuffling, a scraping. It came from outside the back door; an animal, no animal. While they watched, the door opened. A dark hand appeared, set down an old leather satchel roped with clothesline, a corded wood box, a bulging string bag. She came in crabwise, pushing the baggage behind her with one gray, bare heel. Once in, she set down her shoes, rested the small of her back against the door. When she faced round and saw them, she straightened away from the door, hanging her head sideways, arching and lowering it, eyes large on them, cast down and raised again, standing so with her goods beside her—Lucine. Her face was a bad color, but whatever had affrighted it lay behind or ahead of her—not in them. While they watched, she slid out a foot, watching them, slipped the foot into its shoe, then the other, managing in the same movement to edge the satchel further into the room. When they still said nothing, she gave a sudden half-bob, begging permission, in the same instant taking it. Quick as an eel, she stowed the satchel in one corner, the box in another, where they fitted perfectly, in niches the small room never would have been thought to hold, as if all the way here she had been reflecting on her scrub-pail lore of it, saying to herself: the satchel will be out of their way under the sofa, the deal box just fit where the molding ends, behind the chair. When she stood up, her face had returned to its natural ocher, her figure, patted here and there, to its neat calm—a world away from that bare, searching heel. Arms folded, she looked down, expressionless, at the broken stuff on the table. Something, her breath perhaps, dislodged them as she hung over them. As they all watched, the large, mended piece gaped slowly at the jointure, the part with the handle rubbling over on its side. She shook her head, in ownership as well as blame, and went on to the corner where the cot was stacked. Taking it down, she turned, regarding them.

“I’ll mek up the cot in t’yere,” she said softly. “You go on, get what res’ you can on it; t’aint only four. I’ll go ’long in there, sit with her.” This too must have been reflected. She put out her hand, just short of his uncle’s sleeve. “Mek it up good and nice for you, you go on. Less you get your res’, you be all tuckered out in the morning.” Soft as steel, her voice urged, speaking its ownership—they of her, she of them. “You go on, now hear? Less you be all tuckered, time you got to go to the courthouse. You go on.”

And so next day—he went on, and all his entourage with him, in that small craft where each hand thought himself alone, rocked between darks and Orions while all thought themselves still, in a great estuary of the same.

There come times in men’s lives when any accounts of their inner monologues cannot further explain them. Only their acts can record them then, as later they must record themselves. Such a time had come for Pierre.

On that day his uncle, rising from his cot, left about an hour and a half late for his duty; his mother, awakening early to hers, curling up like a griffon on her pillows, silently let herself be tended by Lucine, saying only when time came to move her: “I’ll bide here.” He himself, not returning to bed, marked the day only by showering and changing his clothes. Lack of sleep benumbed them all, letting each harbor his shocks and his speech, promising a day without any heroic other than that needed to get through it. Meanwhile the weather had “gone in,” as people said here of those gray interims, blamed by some on the surrounding masses of water, when the sun went in and took the appearance of heat with it, leaving greens sharper, sounds cooler, people abstracted to shades in a lull like a midweek Sunday or a snow, during which some hastened to sit with their kind over minor husbandries, others sat away from them, paring their nails, hearing time bide. Is there an ecology for all climes perhaps, some balanced pause between a life and the lives around it, when the actionless can act?

Pierre sat in his room as usual that morning, rereading one of the few books he had brought with him. Usually he kept his door closed until Lucine’s soft knock apprised him that she was going to shop, when he opened it in order to hear his mother’s bell. Today he did not close it. Around midmorning his mother suddenly asked for something to sew, a request not easy to satisfy now that the linens had been mended, and all the paraphernalia of her trade cleared away. Finally, at her direction, a packet of silk squares, their edges still raw, was found for her, where it had been lodged with others in one drawer of the old treadle sewing machine now stored in his room. He had glimpsed enough—edges of photographs, letters thin enough to be foreign, envelopes thick enough to be documentary, to know that he had come upon the hoarding-place for which as a boy he had sometimes pried, but now he did not pry. Scattered among the books on the shelf above his desk were certain ones any meddler might have assumed to be his own private mementos: the largest, a German dictionary with an inscription on the flyleaf, the oldest (faded to curiosa long before it could have been his) a bookseller’s trinket marked
Affection’s Gift for
1845, the smallest, so insignificant that it must have been saved for a reason, a dime-store address book with one leaf gone. They were ranged above his head as brashly as the silver cups of the oarsman, as plainly as the purloined letter—the book he had been given, the one he had pinched, the one, first of his life, that he had bought—but any watcher might have seen as plainly that today he did not look at them.

All that day he comported himself with awkward honesty, an especial openness, for what great eye at the transom? Watch a second-story man on his way to work at dusk, as he drops his quarter in the beggar’s cup, see how far from the cup his fingers are, spread wide at the root as a child’s. Follow tomorrow’s headline bogeyman today, on his way not to keep his black appointment, as he sees the movie twice, yawns at the marquee, trembles into conversation at the coffee counter, cedes his place in the bus queue, and still arrives on time. And Pierre too managed it so that some twenty years later his most inflexible arbiter, eager informer, might say here, “He was honest as the day—that day. As far as I know—he premeditated nothing.”

That afternoon he had an errand which took him directly into Tuscana. He was to call at a house across town, pick up a wheel chair relinquished by the death of a woman there, and trundle it back home. Actually the chair was one of a scarce few circulated to chronic outpatients by the new hospital in Denoyeville, but since, as it happened, the woman had been a Mrs. Jebb, their former neighbor, politeness had delayed the exchange until after the funeral, which had been yesterday. Better not wait for the hospital delivery, Mr. Jebb had kindly informed them by telephone; better pick it up by hand, since it was no shape for car transport, and wheel it to its new destination. In the routine of respectable loss, the Jebbs would be “at home” today at four.

Other afternoons, setting out for the daily walk without which his stint here would have been intolerable, he always paused below the porch steps for a minute, looking westerly down the few blocks that led to the center of town, then turned east, always on the same route, down the state road and along the three-and-a-half-mile bypass to Denoyeville, breaking into an easy track-pace on the way there, going at an amble on the way back. Denoyeville had been rebuilt on a single idea; in the middle distance of its dams, as he approached it, that idea still presided and was noble. Otherwise, once he got to its main street, walking between its seven-year brick antiquity and six-month shoddy, he was in the useful limbo of the quick, ledger-built American city, after-image of others even as one stood in it, lost to the closed eye quicker than one could say Ozymandias. Nothing in Denoyeville was ever likely to be older than its name. He was of the generation not yet repelled by this, but comforted. Usually he sat for a while, sweat-soaked and air-cooled, behind the plate glass of the big new Whelan chain drug, at a counter where, except for the hominy on the club breakfast, he might be anywhere south-of-winter, north-of-summer. Sitting there, for an hour or so he was once again on his own.

This afternoon, in the way of things filial, he would have no time for that. He had an errand not his own. So, in the nature of things, after a pause below the porch steps, in which he seemed only to be looking into the general lull, he turned on his heel and walked west. So, late downbeat after the measure, we follow him.

He came near the café, where he had never been inside. There would have been time and enough to stop and meditate there. But it had too much past—or not enough of one—for him to want to enter it now. He went by it.

He came to the church where his mother was to marry his uncle. Had. A church is a proper place to meditate. But he remembered it too well with the light out over its door, and went on.

There is a ring game that children play, with an “it” in the center, the rest in a ring, hidden. Thicket is needed. “Ring” may not move. “It” has three tries for the gaps in the circle. Here a boy confronts him in a bush. Another bars his way in the bramble. Between those trees is a third.

Such a trio confronted him now, unseen by anyone but him, at three doors. One at the courthouse, one at the school, one at the store.

Let the school come first, as it does for most. Its yard was null with summer, the door sealed. The boy there was no more distinct for him than for most men. He passed him quite easily.